SDG16: Part 2 — Enforcing Digital Identity

(by Iain Davis and Whitney Webb | Unlimited Hangout) – The United Nations claims that the purpose of Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG16) is to promote peaceful and inclusive societies and to provide access to justice for all. Hiding behind the rhetoric is the real objective: to strengthen and consolidate the power and authority of the “global governance regime” and to exploit threats—both real and imagined—in order to advance regime hegemony. In Part 2, Iain and Whitney examine the centrality of Digital ID (SDG 16.9) in this endeavour.

In Part 1 of our investigation into the United Nations’ (UN’s) Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG16) we revealed how the UN proclaims itself a “global governance regime.” We investigated the UN’s exploitation of so-called “human rights” as an authoritarian system of behavioural control permits, as opposed to any form of recognisable “rights.”

We examined how the UN uses what is calls the “policy tool” of human rights to place citizens (us) at the centre of international crises. This enables the UN and its “stakeholder partners” to seize crises as “opportunities” to limit and control our behaviour. The global public-private partnership (G3P), with the UN at its heart, redefines and even discards our supposed “human rights” entirely, claiming “crisis” as justification.

The overall objective of SDG16 is to strengthen the UN regime. The UN acknowledges that SDG16.9 is the most crucial of all its goals. It is, the regime claims, essential for the attainment of numerous other SDGs.

At first, SDG16.9 seems relatively innocuous:

By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration

But, as ever, when it comes to UN sustainable development, all is not as it initially appears.

SDG16.9 is designed to introduce a centrally controlled, global system of digital identification (digital ID). In combination with other global systems, such as interoperable Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), this can then be used to monitor our whereabouts, limit our freedom of movement and control our access to money, goods and services.

Universal adoption of SDG16.9 digital ID will enable the G3P global governance regime’s to establish a worldwide system of reward and punishment. If we accept the planned model of digital ID, it will ultimately enslave us in the name of sustainable development.

Digital ID As A Human Right

As we previously discussed, The UN underwent a “quiet revolution” in the 1990s. In 1998, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan stated that “the business of the United Nations involves the businesses of the world.”

Government’s reduced role was to create the regulatory “enabling environment” for private investors, alongside taxpayers, to finance what would become SDGs. Using the highly questionable “climate crisis” as an alleged justification, in 2015, the UN’s Millennium Development Goals gave way to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

On the 25th September 2015, UN General Assembly Resolution 70.1 (A/Res/70.1) formally established the SDGs by adopting the binding resolution to work towards “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

As soon as the ink was dry on the resolution, the UN set about creating the enabling environment to encourage public-private partnerships to develop a system of global, digital ID. In May 2016, in response to SDG16.9, the United Nations Office for Partnerships convened the “ID2020 Summit – Harnessing Digital Identity for the Global Community.” This established the ID2020 Alliance.

The ID2020 Alliance is a global public-private partnership that has been setting the future course of digital identity since its founding. The global accountancy and corporate branding giant PwC was selected by the UN as the “lead sponsor” of the inaugural ID2020 summit in 2016. Excited about the opportunities digital ID would present, PwC described the ID2020 sustainable development objective:

[. . . .] to create technology-driven public-private partnerships to achieve the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goal of providing legal identity for everyone on the planet. [. . .] Specifically, ID2020’s mission aligns with development target 16.9, “Legal identity for all, including birth registration”. Thirty percent of the world’s population, approximately 1.5 billion people, lack a legal identity, leaving them vulnerable to legal, political, social and economic exclusion.

Offering us digital ID to address so-called “economic exclusion,”—more on this shortly—the ID2020 Alliance duly launched in 2017 and set its Agenda2030 goal:

Enabling access to digital identity for every person on the planet.

You will note that the UN’s SDG16.9 makes no mention of global “digital ID.” Sustainable development, as it is presented to us, is nothing if not deceptive.

The ID2020 Alliance announced a “strategic, global initiative” for digital ID that presented humanity with a quite astonishing idea. The regime stated that the lack of “legal identity”—digital ID—prevented people from accessing “healthcare, schools, shelter, justice, and other government services,” thereby allegedly creating what it called “the identity gap.”

Empowered by the “global governance regime,” the ID2020 Alliance expanded on the idea that we are only permitted to live in “its” society if we can prove who we are, using its digital ID, to the satisfaction of the G3P regime.

The ID2020 manifesto states:

The ability to prove one’s identity is a fundamental and universal human right. [. . .] We live in a digital era. Individuals need a trusted, verifiable way to prove who they are, both in the physical world and online. [. . .] ID2020 Alliance partners jointly define functional requirements, influencing the course of technical innovation and providing a route to technical interoperability, and therefore trust and recognition.

SDG16.9 “sustainable development” means we must use digital ID that meets the functional requirements of the ID2020 Alliance partnership. Otherwise we will not be protected in law, service access will be denied, our right to transact in the modern economy will be removed, we will be barred from participating as “citizens” and excluded from so-called “democracy.”

This past August, ID2020 joined with the Digital Impact Alliance (DIA) to “push for digital transformation.” That said, ID2020 “joining” DIA is a bit of a misnomer, considering that both of these public-private partnerships are essentially run by the same organisations.

Speaking about the launch of its “partnership” with DIA, ID2020 founder John Edge, said:

[W]e established ID2020 to be a time-bound exploration of alternative systems for individuals to prove they exist.

In accordance with SDG16.9 “transformation,” if you don’t have the properly authorised digital ID then, as far as the regime is concerned, you don’t exist. As DIA explains, everyone must have “the trusted digital tools they need to fully participate in society.” If you don’t submit, you are literally nobody and thereby excluded from “society.”

The DIA calls its methodology “do[ing] digital right.” Its backers, such as the UN, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID (widely believed to be a front for the CIA) and the UK and Norwegian governments, are all behind the DIA mission:

We use our expertise to influence the influential, encouraging the world’s largest investors and most effective policymakers to “do digital right”, emphasizing the importance of design, implementation, and governance.

Establishing global governance “with teeth” is the primary objective of the G3P regime, and “sustainable development” is its chosen mechanism to achieve its ambitions. As a regime partner, the DIA has been entrusted as the steward of the regime’s associated Principles for Digital Development.

Among these “principles” is the commitment to harvest as much human data as possible and to provide “the right people” with access to that data:

When an initiative is data driven, quality information is available to the right people when they need it, and they are using those data to take action.

The “world’s largest investors” are particularly encouraged to use their money tackle the alleged “identity gap” in least developed countries (LDCs) first. This will be achieved by prioritising investment in “cross-sectoral digital public goods and architecture.”

Very graciously, the G3P will “allow LDCs to be the stewards of their national digital agendas”—providing, of course, that they fully comply with the right “agenda.”

Given the cross-cutting nature of digital and its role in reaching all of the SDG targets, we believe that the current moment in time is ideally suited for such a “push” in LDCs.

The objective is to marshal “the necessary resources to fund and achieve national and global targets.” That is to say, LDC national governments are “allowed” to adopt “digital transformation” policies aligned to “global targets.”

There is no doubt that the ID2020 Alliance fully appreciates the implications of what it is doing. In a now quite infamous 2018 article, one of the founding partners of ID2020, Microsoft, published the following:

As more and more transactions become digital in nature and are built around a single global identification standard, supported by Microsoft, the question of who will govern this evolving global community and economy becomes relevant. Especially since non-participants in this system would be unable to buy or sell goods or services.

While the regime talks about “inclusion,” it is building a global digital ID system that is inherently exclusionary and can punish regime critics or silence dissident voices by cutting them off from its “society.” Being forced to use digital ID against your will is not a “right,” but it can be called a “human right” because, as defined by the UN, those are not rights, they are policy tools.

A global system of biometric digital ID can only become “essential” for all if it is made “essential.” There is no current necessity for it. The need has to be manufactured first. Hence the proclaimed “identity gap.”

Interoperability Is The Key

Biometric data records our “unique biological characteristics.” Fingerprints, iris-scans, DNA, facial recognition and voice-identification are all forms of biometric identifiers that can be stored digitally. Thales, the European defence and security contractor, explains how biometric data can be used for “biometric authentication”:

Biometric authentication compares data for the person’s characteristics to that person’s biometric “template” to determine resemblance. The reference model is first stored. The data stored is then compared to the person’s biometric data to be authenticated. [. . .] [I]ncreased public acceptance, massive accuracy gains, a rich offer, and falling prices of sensors, I.P. cameras, and software make installing biometric systems easier. Today, many applications make use of this technology.

Biometric digital ID is “mapped” to your physical ID. Thus, once we are coerced, forced or deceived into using it, we will always be identifiable on the planned surveillance grid. Read Full Article >